Quotes About Mythology

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

Great God! I'd rather beA pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

In many cultures that are primarily animistic but also recognize a supreme god, the mythologies usually refer to a time when the relationship between the high god and human beings was closer than it is today, so that the notion of the anticipation of a future development does not fit at all.

Max Müller took advantage of the new insights of his time into the IE languages and attempted to explain the development of Greek mythology, not by questioning the facts but by analyzing the language used in mythology. His main point was that mythology arose because people misunderstood poetic language used in the admiration of nature and interpreted it as narrative language about divine beings.

All this was too much for Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a folklorist and disciple of E. B. Tylor, the best-known advocate of the evolution of religion. (We shall focus more on both Lang and Tylor later.) There are two aspects to Lang's reaction to Müller: the weakness of the philological method and the claim that an evolutionary theory can give a better explanation of the content of mythology than philology.

The demon woman is a mythological type, and appears either as the companion of the enemy, or as the seductress of the hero; she sleeps with him-or at least promises to-and kills him.

The great roe is a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion.

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and a reproach among men.

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.

One thing I do know, and I believe you know it too, is that what he is doing goes against the very grain of the universe. He's taking the path of Icarus, and no matter how you mix the wax, it melts when it gets too close to the sun.

Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth's way of making another myth.

We all live with myths that undermine our capacity to fight cancer. For example, many of us are convinced that cancer is primarily linked to our genetic makeup, rather than our lifestyle. When we look at the research, however, we can see that the contrary is true.

How on earth Nietzsche, a supporter of Dionysus, went through a phase of vegetarianism is mind-boggling. Just as bad, Nietzsche was no fan of alcohol. No wonder Dionysus smote his sacrilegious ass and drove him insane, a common fate for all those that defy Dionysus.

The superhero universe is a uniquely American mythology. It replaces the mythology America never had. Native Americans have a long history, but the world knows very little about that history. The fact that colonial America has no history – in the sense of a history stretching back thousands of years – is a fact that haunts the American psyche. The Americans are always in the business of filling that vacuum.

The old gods were the Titans. Humans are the Olympians. We banished the previous generation of gods to make gods of ourselves. But billions of humans still swear their allegiance to the deposed gods.

In the end, it was a lot of nothing about nothing, thank God—or whoever it was capriciously doling out miracles while also creating the circumstances under which such were prayed for. Lucy wondered if maybe she should convert to Norse mythology or something, one of the ones with trickster gods, like Loki. The available evidence seemed to vindicate that kind of god, as opposed to the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving creator of space-time she'd been raised to believe in.

Vampires, real vampires, didn't nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked the blood out of the chunks.

the emperor had chewed off his balls and stuffed a one-way ticket to the Black Sea up his rectum [Marcus Corvinus explains what happened to Ovid]

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.

Gogh. The Woman in the Wood. Caravaggio. The Gorgon Tisiphone. Bruegel. The Plague Doctor.

Shepherdess of the Sphinxes by Leonor Fini.

Egypt," Stoker pointed out acidly, "is not filthy. It was once the cradle of civilization. I would suggest you read a book, but I am not entirely certain of your ability to do so.

Anubis. Destructive and demoralizing, but not malevolent.